Photo of Steven Marshall, Standard Chartered, Peter Lay, and Inci Yalman, Standard Chartered.

A collaborative project between the British Council, SAP and Standard Chartered allowed the charity to automate its host-to-host payments solution across East and West Africa. The judging panel at Treasury Today felt this was a remarkable achievement because the treasury experienced little difficulty when it came to implementing its host-to-host ACH payments solution in the region. What is more, the Council was rolling out another banking solution in Asia – in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal – at the same time. As a result, this meant that the treasury faced significant logistical challenges in these regions, relating to its banking partners.

For example, in the case of Pakistan, the central bank clearing system had not been brought on stream so the treasury team had to work with Standard Chartered to develop a workaround that involved the bank’s ‘clearing for vendors’ facility in the region. “It is to Standard Chartered’s credit that they have the relationship imagination and commitment to offer clients like us front of house access for customer banking needs in places like Karachi, where, without the bank’s support we would not be able to reach out and offer access to our English, education and cultural opportunities,” says Peter Lay, Head of Treasury and Banking at the British Council.

From Sierra Leone to Ghana across to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, the local banking expertise and engagement from Standard Chartered supports regional staff and continues to push the envelope for delivering the latest technological solutions. This will enable customers to access the British Council within an increasingly digital environment where mobile phone devices demand the Council’s attention.

“We needed host-to-host payments in very different contexts across some challenging countries and we also needed to be able to deliver an XML solution. This has proved to be the most effective payments delivery channel with very little support intervention and great reliability,” explains Lay.

The solution offered by Standard Chartered Bank demonstrates ‘the art of the possible’ with SAP/host-to-host integration with a bank across probably the most diverse and difficult geographical country propositions into the charity’s India Shared Service Centre. The Council was able to leverage existing SAP technologies that it had installed and SAP’s NetWeaver was just what the Council was looking for when it came to integrating its ERP system and banking platforms.

To this end, the Council focused on establishing a repeatable global solution that could be fine-tuned to meet local requirements. This approach allowed the British Council to move the solution from Beijing to Delhi seamlessly. “What’s been so brilliant about the solution is that we can run our payments in the many countries in which we operate but we can also run our payments from one centralised solution, without manual intervention.” As a result of the new SAP solution, the Council has been able to consolidate its five regional hubs into one global centre that supports 110 countries.

“The automated integration between The British Council’s SAP ERP and our banking partners was the best fit for our business needs. All in all, it was a great success thanks to a low total cost of ownership, the usage of a single global blueprint to facilitate on-time regional rollouts, and also the fact that we were able to leverage existing SAP software and in-house expertise.”

Greater automation has also improved process efficiency at the charity although transactional identification and improving reconciliation automation remain challenges. The British Council has however significantly reduced the time it needs to conduct management control. The new banking solution also supports the organisation’s goal to centralise operations and reduce reliance on regional and in country resource administration, as demonstrated by the consolidation of its five shared service centres to just one in Delhi, India.